Existential Analysis 30.

2: July 2019

Being Toward 2048: The Future

Troubles of Dasein and Why Existential
Phenomenological Psychotherapy Will
be Important: Parts I and II*
Presentation given at the Society for Existential Analysis Annual
Conference, London, 10 November 2018
* Parts III and IV will be published in Existential Analysis 31.1, in
January 2020

Richard Swann

Abstract
What forces might bring new pressures on the individual as the user of
therapy and the therapist as the provider, over the next thirty years?
Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and advancing medical science are
shaping new ways to think about the ontology of Dasein. Using the
technique of scenario planning, three visions of future worlds of therapy
are presented.
Key Words
Enframing, transindividuation, post-humanism, AI, big data, being-in-
the-world, Caring
‘If we think of the world’s future, we always mean the place it
will get to if it keeps going as we see it going now and it doesn’t
occur to us that it is not going in a straight line but in a curve
& that its direction is constantly changing.’
(Wittgenstein, 1998: p 5e)

Introduction
The occasion of the thirtieth anniversary conference of the Society of
Existential Analysis presents an opportunity to look back on the history
of the Society, but also to look forward. If such a thing is feasible, this
paper proposes looking forward thirty years to where we might be and
what challenges we may face in the work that we do. To look so far into
the future might seem, and probably is, a wholly foolhardy proposition,
as Wittgenstein suggests in the epigraph. The wondering of this paper is,
in the spirit of Foucault’s (2003: pp 1-2) lectures at the College de France,

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a form of sharing or a report on the direction of reading and research

undertaken by me over the past year or so. This comes about because of
the strange situation in which I find myself, located in Dubai, a relentlessly
modern urban environment rushing toward a future that seems more
nakedly visible, as it bursts forth the desert, than it might seem in the
more historically cluttered world of London and the United Kingdom.
The aim of this paper is to open up, tentatively, glimpses of futures. I
hope that this might help us, as predominantly existential psychotherapists,
consider some of the changes that the horizon of the world may bring into
view over the next thirty years. Heidegger uses some powerful language
to convey a sense that Being-in-the-world is not just about the becoming
of Dasein, but also about the interaction of that becoming with the ‘worlding’
of the world (e.g. Heidegger, 1977: p 49 and 1971: p 44). In other words,
we live our lives and in doing so we are indivisibly changing and evolving
as the world around us constantly changes and evolves. At the onset of
life, our thrownness (Heidegger, 1962/1927: p 174) in the world is total;
we have no choice but to find it as it is. As we move through life, and the
totality of thrownness abates, it does so less than we might sense because
the world into which we were originally thrown also evolves in ways over
which we have little or no control or even discernment. This sense is
especially powerful in the writing and thought of existentialists all the
way back to Kierkegaard and the early nineteenth century. In retrofitting
Heidegger’s language back into the world of Kierkegaard and the earlier
existential writers, the velocity with which the worlding of the world occurs
has the capacity to overwhelm the becoming of Dasein – the single ‘one’
against the march of history is not a fair fight.
As we move deeper into the twenty-first century there appears to be no
abatement in the influence of science and technology to empower and
enrich our lives but also to envelop us with new existential challenges.
These challenges have names like Climate Change, Overpopulation, Resource
Depletion, Nuclear Terrorism, Biowarfare, the Singularity. At the macro-
societal level it is not clear that these issues are being very effectively
confronted at present. At the micro-level, at the level of Dasein as individual
in the world, there is a well established and evolving set of propositions
and practices that can help individuals navigate their experiences in the
world and they are collectively called existentialism, phenomenology and,
to help those who feel the burden of living more than others, existential-
phenomenological psychotherapy. Which is also to say that, in turbulent
times, the problems of mental health do not exist solely in a skull-sized
ecological niche of behavioural and neuro-scientific explanation, or in the
microcosmic niche of the family and its complicated psychodynamics, but
in a world-sized niche abundant in confusion and challenge over the matters
of history, identity, meaning, dignity and futurity.

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This is an impossibly complex and rapidly changing context that compounds

the foolhardiness of such a future-faced venture as this paper. One only
has to think back to the year of the founding of the SEA and recall the
world of 1988. This was the bipolar world of the USSR and NATO. Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were still in power. Who had a mobile phone
(a very small number of people)? Or was connected to the World Wide
Web (no one, it was not invented, as we know it, until 1992)? However,
this was not a stable or predictable world. Great shifts in geo-politics were
already becoming evident although, and this is no real surprise, no one
could have predicted the colossal instabilities that would be created by the
twin events of the collapse of the old Soviet Bloc and the rise of digital
technology. These events are the curves and changes in direction that
Wittgenstein describes and that should cousel us away from seeing the
future as merely the progression from where we are to where we ‘should
be’ thirty years from now.
To assist in the endeavor of making sense of what might happen over the
next thirty years, and how these possible developments might impact on the
being of Dasein differently from, say, the clearly existential threat of climate
change, I propose to select some technological drivers of change that are
already impacting our lives and the world (Artificial Intelligence, Big Data,
Networks and Advanced Healthcare), and examine how they will influence
certain key dimensions of ordinary living (Work, Identity and Urban Living).
And, finally, to describe in brief three future scenarios of life in 2048 considering
the interaction of technological (r)evolution with Being and becoming. The
drivers of future life that I have chosen are those that, as yet, pose something
of a mystery in terms of their potential to disclose a linear worlding of the
world and thus to pose new dilemmas for Dasein.
PART I – A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
I have drawn on a number of sources from the existential literature and
from some writers and thinkers who might be described as existential
fellow-travellers, sympathizers, contemporary commentators and philosophers,
who also draw from the well-springs of continental philosophy and often
from specifically existential inspirations.
Three views of the future
The French philosopher and anthropologist Michel Augé (2014) proposes
two views of how the future evolves and I, inspired by Augé and by Dante
(1996), suggest a third view.

1. Succession
Augé (2014: p 3) describes a view of the future that is an extrapolation
of what we see, experience and understand about the past and present

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and that we believe will evolve into the future in more or less discernible
ways – trends and signs in the present can be seen as reliable way markers
to the future. This is a way of looking at the future that Wittgenstein
(1998) clearly criticizes when he comments ‘it doesn’t occur to us…’ that
the future cannot be so easily predicted (see epigraph). It is also the view
of history that psychoanalytic and psychologistically based schools of
psychotherapy espouse in their models of childhood development into
adulthood. There are aspects of life that we can more or less entertain as
predictable in order for us to be able to plan a future at all. There are also
significant political dimensions to this view of the future in the form of
a proposed human right – a right to a future tense, or futurity as Zuboff
(2019: p 329) describes – the right for the world not to be so chaotic and
unpredictable that all sense of a future becomes obscured in doubt, fear
and precarious living.

2. Inauguration
Alternatively, Augé (2014: p 19) describes a future that is a rupture from
the past and is therefore essentially unknowable because innovation and
change is so rapid, so profound and so disturbing as to make prediction
over anything other than a very short term, nonsensical, even as an exercise
in constructive misunderstanding (to which I hope that this paper aspires,
for example). There is reason to believe that the future, as currently
imagined, has strong elements of an inauguration, and extrapolation can
take place only over truncated time frames. Within this framework of
thinking, the question arises of whether we can speak meaningfully of a
future for the existential phenomenological tradition of psychotherapy,
except in the starkest of, quite literally, existential terms.

3. Culmination
Augé’s two views of the future are, I believe, based on the notion that
history will continue indefinitely to be a dynamic process of unfolding
of the human-focused set of narratives about the past, present and potential
futures of humankind. However there is a scenario, which I name a
‘culmination’, where humanity, as we understand it now, comes to an end
point – not necessarily a catastrophic one – but perhaps we might think
of it as a stasis, beyond which human level evolution is no longer possible,
desirable and/or necessary. The notion is inspired by Dante’s visions of
Inferno (Hell) and Paradiso (Heaven), as end points beyond which further
travel is impossible. As we will see later, there are some ideas for a post-
human future that have the flavor of an inauguration and a culmination
– one thinks specifically of the Singularity (Kurzweil, 2005) or, a bit less
dramatically, the ideology of post-humanism and techno-humanism (e.g.
Braidotti, 2013).

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Heidegger and the Concepts of Enframing and Standing

Reserve
Heidegger’s ideas expounded in, among other places, The Question
Concerning Technology (1977), are important. In particular, the rapid and
deeply penetrative deployment of complex, networked, intelligent and
self-improving digital systems to modulate, enable, empower (at many
levels), assist and resist Dasein, singly and at the levels of whole populations,
will markedly alter our ideas of Being. Two concepts stand out as especially
important in Heidegger’s thinking on technology, that of Enframing and
of the Standing Reserve.
Enframing (Gestell) (1977: p 19) attempts to encapsulate the idea that
technology does not merely represent the creative efforts of Dasein to
deploy artifice and efficiency to shape, control, explore and exploit its
environment, as a means to an end (safety, security, comfort, wealth), but
that the ongoing invention of technology and the interaction with technology,
as it evolves over time, becomes in itself a mode of Being for Dasein. This
occurs on at least three levels:

1. Technology (one might describe this as the ‘how’ of ‘know-how’)

is the product of techne, the ‘know-how’, to enable certain modes
of living and in particular enable greater efficiency, safety, sophistication
and speed in living.
2. Techne, and its prosthetic manifestations in technology, becomes
a framework for exploring and exploiting the world as it is continuously
encountered by Dasein – one need only think of how the world
discloses itself differently to those who explore their surroundings
only on foot, or then by horse, or by motorized vehicle, or by
aeroplane or by spacecraft, to think of how the world opens up to
Dasein in different ways, and once experienced, cannot then be
unexperienced.
3. The Being of Dasein interacting with technology and constantly
enhancing techne compounds through innovation, the ideology of
innovation and the acceleration of innovation. This portends a
sense that Being can only be revealed to Dasein through the constant
deployment and refinement of technology, and ceases to be Being.
Being and Dasein are therefore in danger of estrangement (1977:
p 27). Dasein begins to lose sight of the framework for what it is,
which is a kind of manifestation of ‘falling’ (gefallenheit), a drifting
through space and time inattentive to the multiplicity of dynamics
at play between the world and the frame. I want to be mindful at
this point not to be drawn into contentious issues of authenticity
and what real ‘Being’ might consist of, but instead note that, to
borrow a phrase from Anthony Trollope (1994), ‘The Way We Live

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Now’, in 2018, does not closely resemble the way we lived in

1988, let alone in 1518, 1018 or 18BCE.

Heidegger’s secondary concept of the Standing Reserve (1977: p 17)

might be thought of as the view of the world through the window of
technology, where the world is regarded as ‘stock’ (Standing Reserve),
ready-to-hand for exploitation and disposal, much as a forester would view
the forest as a source of wood for multiple uses. The ideology of technology
encourages a view of the World as tractable, useful and composed of mute
resources. For the most part this fact is simply how it is – humankind
exploits its environments in order to survive and then to thrive. This
exploitation becomes problematic when the resources of the environment
become over-exploited and the results of exploitation lead to the activation
of adverse feedback mechanisms such as conflict, climate change or, more
relevant here, when the exploitation of the environment evolves to include,
or turn on, Dasein itself.
Bernard Stiegler and the Economy of Traceology
Bernard Stiegler (2016: p 101) explores the idea of the modern economy
of traceology that increasingly envelops our daily existences and enmeshes
us in the frame of technology. Heidegger’s ideas of Enframing retain the
potential for the preservation of recognition between Being and Dasein,
i.e. that estrangement is not total and that some disclosure of Being is
still possible, albeit in what a Heideggerian commentator views as a kind
of photographic negative (Lovitt in Heidegger, 1977: p xxxvi) – a being
that is not Being but still allows a glimpse of how Being can manifest
and be experienced. Stiegler explores how this potential for recognition
could be eclipsed by exploitation of the economy of traceology leading
to the overwhelming of what he describes as noetic faculties (Steigler,
2016: p 42) and the short-circuiting of the process of trans-individuation
(ibid: p 200). Stiegler draws upon and extends Husserl’s work on the
phenomenology of sense perception and memory, and in particular his
notions of primary, secondary and tertiary retentions (ibid: p 31).
Think of the experience of listening to and remembering a piece of
music. The primary retention, or primary act, of memory formation is that
of listening in the moment to the music, following it and becoming familiar
with it as it plays. The secondary retention is the memory that you may
have of the music in your mind and body the day after and the day after
that. The tertiary retention is a recording of the music, either in audio form,
say on a tape or vinyl record, or in sheet music form – the important
distinction here is that the music has now become externalized from memory
in perfect analogue form, rendered permanent and frozen in its performance
for multiple reiterations and faithful prosthetic remembrances. From here,

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Stielger (ibid: p 17) now extends the classification of retentions to take

account of digital technology unknown to Husserl. Tertiary retentions
become digital; computer coded into binary data and, therefore, infinitely
replicable at no extra cost and capable of highly compressed and efficient
storage. Finally, tertiary digital retentions become ‘reticulated’ (2016: p
14), capable of being networked and therefore capable of almost instant
and infinite distribution through networks – the networks, of course, being
the dense, widespread, evolving systems of communication, operating 24/7,
which connect nearly all of us via smart phones, tablet computers, the
internet, World Wide Web, the burgeoning internet of things and the other
subsystems of the digitally enabled world.
Some implications of this phenomenology of technology are becoming
clearer. Not only can the digital universe operate as a supremely efficient
means of collecting, recording, storing, organizing, replicating and distributing
information, whatever it may be – books, music, photographs, film, video,
software, conversation, news, events, journalism, friendship networks –
but these systems now have the power to record, retain and analyze ongoing
information about how we interact with every aspect of the network. All
traces of our movement and behavior in the digital universe, whether or
not we are aware of it, or have consented to it, are capable of being retained
and exploited by computational networks and the organizations that operate
and own them. Who has time to read privacy consent forms, let alone
negotiate a better deal for the exploitation of our personal user history (see
Zuboff, 2019: pp 48-50)? The ceding of this data, which Stiegler calls
‘traces’ and that others call ‘digital exhaust’ or ‘behavioral surplus’ (ibid:
p 8), to third parties, creates an economy of traceology (Stiegler, 2016:
p 101). The sense of economy here being not only a reference to the
(lucrative) business of buying and selling these traces, but also refers to
the general environment in which such information can be collected with
impunity and used in feed-back loops to nudge our behavior in the digital
world. And as we spend increasing amounts of time in the digital world
or as the frame through which we increasingly view life becomes ubiquitously
screen-shaped, the nudging becomes more or less constant.

Symbolic Misery
Within the economy of digital reticulated traces, Stiegler identifies two
important processes bearing on Being and a consequent outcome that
flows from these processes. The processes are Proletarianization (ibid:
p 30 et passim) and Automatization (ibid: p 20) leading to the outcome
of symbolic misery (Stiegler, 2014: p 1). The first of these processes,
Proletarianization, is a rapid de-skilling of many forms of work. Originally,
this process was a mechanical one in which the artisanal skills used in

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many forms of manual or semi-manual work were translated from humans

into machines – the powered looms of the industrial revolution are an
example of the proletarianization of hand-weaving (Stiegler, 2016: p 160).
In the evolving digital world, this process can now be applied to a great
many non-manual/intellectual tasks such as financial management, auditing,
large amounts of legal work, teaching, medical diagnostics, traffic
management, crime detection; so many fields of work in fact, that over
the next thirty years who will not have to ask the question ‘Can my job
be digitized/automated?’. The implications for the world of work are
profound and the implications for work as a central feature of Dasein’s
experience of the world, as we have hitherto understood it, can and will
change considerably.
Furthermore, the speed with which digital networks can operate, has the
potential, according to Stiegler to overwhelm the reflective capabilities or,
to use his phrase, the noetic faculties (p 42) of users, not only as workers,
but as consumers (2016: p 297n). His thinking here suggests that the migration
of so much of the business of living into the online world both proletarianizes
the skills of workers but also automatizes the behaviours of individuals in
their online existences to an increasingly alarming degree. The speed with
which, for example, adverts and recommendations for further purchases can
be fed to us on the screen as we go about the daily rituals of our online lives,
is faster than we can think about these things in the offline world. The dream
of digital corporations is to be able to anticipate our desires and needs and
meet them before we have time for reflection (and to some extent they are
succeeding). Data travels in the fibre optic network at about half the speed
of light, many thousands of times faster than reflective conscious thinking
in the human brain or the reflexes of the nervous system. Stiegler contends
that the speed of delivery of data to our screens for our central and peripheral
attention encourages a kind of digital nihilism, whereby one ceases to reflect
on one’s desires and requirements and on the balance of needs that must be
met, and instead simply act by clicking, because the thinking has been
outsourced to the network. In the end, there is no longer any need to do the
hard work of paying attention.
These processes culminate in Symbolic Misery which Stiegler (2014)
sees as a de-skilling of creativity completing the process of manual de-
skilling accelerated by the industrial revolution. Symbolic Misery is an
impoverishment of sensibility, of judgment, of the ability to hold in mind
an alternative model of living, other than that of consumer and spectator,
as one transacts life in the world of tertiary, digital and reticulated data.
Stiegler writes, ‘[Symbolic Misery]…ultimately leads to the ruin of all
economy whatsoever, when,[…], speculative marketing, under direct
shareholder control, becomes hegemonic and systematically exploits the
drives, which are thereby divested of all attachment’ (2016: p 20). These

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processes eventually stall the work of becoming or, in Stiegler’s terminology,

of individuation. Not only does the digital environment de-skill us but
then becomes so familiar with our, by now, de-skilled individuality, such
as it might now be, that it then removes the requirement for us even to
contemplate what needs and desires we might wish to pursue as a matter
of constructive choice – we are merely reduced to curated menu selection.
I acknowledge at this point there is a certain level of exaggeration being
performed for the extrapolation of present trends into a dim future.
Enormous quantities of data about our online behaviour, our contacts,
friends, reading habits, search interests, credit ratings, shopping histories,
viewing foibles and so forth are now known to governmental and commercial
organizations remote from our ordinary, but not daily, experience. What is
it now like to know that so much of our daily activity is surveilled, recorded,
stored, analyzed and then acted upon by remote and opaque organizations?
What is it like for those who were not born into the digital age of ubiquitous
computing (I was born in 1964) compared to those, say, born from 2000
onward, and who know little of the world before the internet. What existential
issues arise for therapists and clients as users of therapy, to become increasingly
enmeshed in the digital world and to become increasingly transparent in our
ways of Being to an audience of corporations and governmental organizations?
In other words, what is it like to become as ‘Standing Reserve’ whose online
words and deeds are the stock-in-trade for commercial organizations to
harvest and governmental organisations to regulate?

Rosie Braidotti and Post-Humanity

If Bernard Stiegler provides some useful tools to try and imagine the hyper-
technologized and hyper-connected world of a digital future, then Rosie
Braidotti, another contemporary philosopher with an eye to the future of
the human condition, attempts to provide some tools to think about the
evolution of human identity in a more visceral, embodied way. This becomes
very interesting when we consider how medical science might evolve over
the next thirty years, and in particular, the efforts radically to prolong
healthy life, as well as the increasing sophistication which will be brought
to bear on the physical and chemical/genetic modification of human bodies
and minds in vitro, in infancy and in later stages of life.
Braidotti reminds us that, at the height of the Cold War and the nuclear
armed confrontation between the Soviet Union and NATO, Bertrand Russell
posed the question: ‘Has Man a Future?’ (2013: p 6). The question was
articulated in this very specific manner, and Braidotti, while acknowledging
its continuing relevance as a question in the post-Cold War era, picks up
on some nuances of wording to broaden the saliency of the question. Russell
posed the question in the face of potential global nuclear annihilation and

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the end of the species of humanity. Braidotti poses the question with a
number of different variations:

1. The future of Man qua the ideologies of maleness, Western-ness,

the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Humanistic project,
embodied, for her, in da Vinci’s idealized image of Vitruvian man;
2. The existential threat to the future of the human species posed by
problems such as climate change;
3. The future of the integrity of the human subject in a machine age
– Becoming-Machine; and
4. The future of human subjectivity in a digitally hyper-enabled world.

The latter two of these variants are of especial interest in my proposed

creation of scenarios for the future. However, all of these re-framings of
the original Russellian question, and others that Braidotti explores, circle
around the core issue of the unravelling of dated and rigid notions of
identity, previously dependent on only a few (‘acceptable’) categories,
particularly of gender, race and sexuality.
In rehearsing important propositions and assumptions about Humanism
and Anti-Humanism, Braidotti arrives, dialectically, at her departure point
for the rest of her thesis on Post-Humanism with the idea that the proper
study of Post-Humanity is the Post-Human. In the course of this theoretical
set-up, the concept of ‘Individualism’ as an ‘intrinsic part of “human
nature”…’ (ibid: p 24), is questioned as culturally and historically localized
to the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. The critique of these
ideas is itself controversial, for example in attempting to undermine the
notion of the sense that each individual has of being the person who
experiences who they are, because no one else can. This is a strand of
philosophizing that attempts to hollow out the sense of self, and the integrity
of the experience of being an individual as both passive and active participant
in living or Being. It has its corollary in the closet ideology of the commercial
digital corporations of our age who would want to bypass our personal
sense of agency and remove all friction, including our sense of resistance,
from the serving of our needs and desires. However, Braidotti’s critical
stance toward Enlightenment notions of the individual and human nature
are not of the same nihilistic order but are meant to signpost the way to
new and more creative ways of constructing participative, flexible, ecologically
sensitive and multi-layered identities.
Nevertheless, with the rapidly increasing amount of our lives that is now
recorded, stored and analyzed on a daily basis, there is an argument for
examining the hypothesis that we are, nearly all of us, creating, curating
and having created for us, digital doubles in the realm of cyberspace. There

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is a case to say that we are no longer just ourselves but also our digital
history, which we author, like a book, every day. But also, like a book,
once published we authors no longer have full, or even much, control over
the history that our digital traces record. Not only governments, but especially
commercial entities can now record and store data-fied versions of our
behaviour and actions at a quality of granularity in time that is less than
second-by-second.
At another level, the anti-Humanistic project of undermining the sense
of the individual as a self is also recognition of the reality of ‘unprecedented
degrees of intimacy and intrusion’ (ibid: p 89) that we now experience in
our relationship with technology. For Braidotti, this presents the Post-
Human with an aporia that forces a re-examination of ‘ontological categories,
for instance between the organic and the inorganic, the born and the
manufactured, flesh and metal, electronic circuits and organic nervous
systems’ (ibid: p 89).
Finally, Braidotti’s concept of ‘spiritual death’ is of interest. This concept
accompanies and amplifies the call to re-examine ontological categories.
Certain activities and states of being, such as ‘…addictions, eating disorders,
melancholia, burn-out and states of apathy and disaffection…’ are described
as ‘…embodied social practices…’ using a language that removes these
words from the language practices of medical pathology, and re-appropriates
them for the language of ‘…neutral manifestations of interactions with
and resistance to the political economy of commodification of all that live’
(ibid: p 114). This was written before the scale of the opioid crisis in the
United States was fully understood (even if it is now?), but within this
earlier context Braidotti is already talking of the blurring of lines between
self-destructive and fashionable behaviour presented by choices of legal
drugs such as Prozac and Ritalin and illegal drugs. It was also written
before the scale of personal data harvesting, to which we are all now
subject, became clear.
These ideas present a contemporary take on the alienation of the individual
that is a familiar trope of the existential critiques of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
Marcuse and French existentialism. The twenty-first century has magnified
both the scale of the problem and the mechanisms by which it is effected
and sustained. We are becoming our data, but we do not own or have
access, in large part, to that data.
PART II – DRIVERS OF CHANGE

Artificial Intelligence
If we hold the potential global crises of climate change, political instability,
population growth, mass migration, resource depletion beyond the scope
of this paper and known already as existential risks, then Artificial

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Intelligence (AI), or machine intelligence has the greatest potential to

impact the way of life that we currently experience. It has the potential
to threaten the tenure of large sectors of the white-collar workforce over
the next thirty years and, combined with robotics, much of the remaining
blue-collar work force. Lest we think that the intensely human activity
of psychotherapy is immune from the potential for disruption through the
application of artificial intelligence, then recall that even in the early
1970s AI had advanced enough to be able to impersonate convincingly
the responses of a Rogerian psychotherapist (although convincing to
whose satisfaction is another question!) (Bostrom, 2014: p 6). In the
present, projects such as BINA48, owned and designed by Martine Rothblatt’s
Terasem Movement, have already reached a point where a free-standing
(i.e. not connected to the internet for the duration of the experiment),
AI-enabled unit can deliver a lecture at undergraduate level and conduct
a credible Q&A session afterwards without scripting or foreknowledge
of questions (Atkinson, 2018). As a vision of a future thirty years distant,
imagine a holographic projection of the ‘ideal therapist’ able to respond
to any given situation in a therapy room – assuming, of course, that not
all psychotherapeutic interventions have been, by then, reified solely as
neurochemical or neurophysical problems for exclusive treatment by pills
or neurosurgical intervention.
This is not to say that mass unemployment is the future. Some estimates
of the likely impact of the progressive rollout of AI applications in the
workplace put the percentage of workers that will be displaced at levels
below 20% (Manyika and Sneader, 2018: p 8). Alarming though this may
sound, there are worse scenarios envisaged, partly driven by the fact that,
at present, there is very little sense of what alternative meaningful and
remunerative work might be created to offset losses. This lack of a future
clarity adds to the many other factors that are creating an acute sense of
uncertainty in the present age.
AI and AGI
At present, but with an eye to the future, it is important understand some
basic terminology of AI. AI itself can be defined as follows:

1. Any technique that enables computers to mimic human intelligence

using logic, if-then rules, decision trees and machine learning,
including deep learning, where;
2. Machine learning is a subset of AI that includes abstruse statistical
techniques that enable machines to improve at tasks with experience.
This also includes;
3. Deep Learning, the sub-set of machine learning utilizing algorithms
that permit software to train itself to perform tasks like speech and

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 Being Toward 2048: Parts I and II

image recognition, by exposing multi-layered neural networks to

vast amounts of data; and where
4. A Neural Network is a framework or grid that allows multiple
different machine learning algorithms to work together to perform
complex data analysis.
(Quora.com, 2018)
It is debatable whether existing AI capabilities have yet passed the famous
Turing Test, whereby an artificially created, machine-based intelligence has
convincingly mimicked human responsive behavior indistinguishable from
those of a real human. Nevertheless, AI is already capable of certain much
narrower tasks that far exceed the capabilities of the human mind in both
speed, complexity and range of data processing – these capabilities include
playing chess and Go, processing and analyzing vast ranges of machine
ready data for forecasting, behavioural analysis across populations, financial
analysis and stock trading, scientific and engineering modelling, mapping
and location analysis, and AI is getting extremely good at language translation,
speech recognition and image recognition and will continue to improve.
Further into the future but believed by some experts to be within the
thirty-year time horizon used here (Bostrom, 2014: p 19), AI has the potential
to evolve to become AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, which Bostrom
describes as having the following features:

1. A capacity to learn;
2. An ability to deal effectively with uncertainty and probabilistic
information;
3. An ability to extract useful concepts from sensory data and internal
states; and
4. A capacity to leverage acquired concepts into flexible combinatorial
representations for use in logical and intuitive reasoning (ibid:
p 23).

Bostrom describes a number of R&D pathways that might achieve the

goal of AGI, with the most likely thought to be via continuing innovation
in machine-based computing including the evolution of ever-more sophisticated
programming and the creation of powerful algorithms thereby enabled, as
well as further increases in the raw speed, power and data holding capacity
of future computing. One culmination point for this project is to create the
first artificial entity that achieves levels of capability across all dimensions
of human intelligence, which allied to the brute force of machine-based
computing, then has the capacity to quickly transcend human intelligence
through its immensely powerful recursive learning capabilities. Something
like this is envisaged as the famous ‘Singularity’ popularized by the computer

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Richard Swann

guru and futurologist Ray Kurzweil in his book of the same name (2005).
This has profound existential implications. However, not all AI practitioners
are as certain about the prospects of being able to achieve AGI. Some
believe it is going to take much longer and some believe it will never be
possible. There are others who believe it will come more quickly as well,
hence the balance of probabilities is currently set at around 2047 or someway
between 2040-2055 (Bostrom, 2014; Tegmark, 2017).
One objection might be that AGI and human consciousness, whatever
that might be, will never be the same thing. In particular, the argument
that consciousness will simply emerge out of complexity, much like the
first self-replicating organisms eventually emerged out of the increasingly
complex chemistry of the early Earth, or human consciousness eventually
emerged through the long march of evolutionary complexity, is a guess,
or a hope, rather than a racing certainty. Another objection might be that
it is actually the more limited capabilities of the human brain in terms of
its powers to render intelligible its environment – and its embodiment in
a particular locus at any given moment – that render meaning for a human
in a way that an AGI entity cannot achieve. It is the very Being-there-ness,
of Being that simply cannot be replicated by an AGI entity. The AGI cannot
and will not experience the aspect of randomness in the thrownness of life
– why this life rather than any other life? And cannot experience learning,
growth and development in the many ways that a human being does, with
our generally limited capacities for memory and recall, and which involve
effort and pain and failure, as well as success and achievement. When
recall is perfect and instantaneous, and can draw on ubiquitous sensory
data and memory, where is the pain of doubt or of being found in error,
and where is the pleasure of achieving understanding? These aspects of
the Being of Dasein are rendered dead or useless by mechanical omniscience.
The sentimental renderings of ‘intelligent’ robots as depicted in films such
as Her (2013) or I, Robot (2004) can likely only ever be simulations of
emotions that have no grounds in hope, doubt or pain. It may well turn
out that pain, that most inconvenient of human sensations, is what is
inimitable to a machine.
Big Data
In 2008, Chris Anderson, then the Editor of Wired, declared the death of
theory. He argued that the integration of increasing amounts of digital data
and the evolving sophistication of algorithmic analysis rendered redundant
the need for theorizing about reasons and causes. One could simply crunch
the numbers, so to speak, and watch as computers churned out the results
of correlations in data sets that otherwise might never have been revealed
or taken months, even years of researcher time to analyse and uncover.

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 Existential Analysis 30.2: July 2019

Myer-Schönburg and Cukier (2017: p 52) comment that, ‘Knowing why

might be pleasant […] Knowing what, not why, is good enough’.
The World Wide Web has existed for twenty-five years and has witnessed
colossal growth in numbers of users, quantity of usage and usefulness.
The quantities of data available to online entities set up for its capture is
also rapidly increasing and set to continue to do so as the so-called ‘Internet-
of-Things’ grows and adds data-gathering devices to the network. Our
homes and possessions will be increasingly networked. Household items
such as fridges, thermostats, vacuum cleaners, cookers, children’s toys,
doorbells and televisions are already networkable, to say nothing of the
growing market for home assistants such as Alexa, Siri or Cortana, as well
as driverless cars. All these devices, and many more, are or will be connection-
enabled so that some entity, a corporation with busy servers, will be learning
something about the usage of those devices every time they are employed,
and often when they are not.
Heidegger’s (1977) concept of Enframing becomes particularly useful
in this context because it provides a way to appreciate that the internet of
Things extends, to a very great extent, the capacity for the ‘datafication’
of all life. Much daily activity is rendered as digital data into the network
of digital life, and life itself is increasingly viewed only through the frame
of the data that is captured. Foer (2017: p 76) captures the dangers of this
process in his idea of the automation of thinking. We have already encountered
this in Stiegler’s related concept of automatization and the short-circuiting
of noetic processes. High-profile corporations such as Amazon, Netflix or
Facebook and their competitors and rivals aim to streamline choice on
your behalf by attempting, through data capture and analysis, to understand
what you like and do not like, when, where and how much, the better to
then make suggestions for further consumption of similar products. So far,
we broadly accept this – we give up the data of our online activity in return
for convenience, cheapness, availability and a digital conveyor belt of new
viewing/reading/listening suggestions. For how long we are prepared to
accept this ‘bargain’ is a matter of debate.
In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes:
‘The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies
in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside
the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing
upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make
itself master of it.’
(1986: p 16)
Wittgenstein (2009: p 52e) extends this proposition in his idea of the
bewitchment of language, a sense that the separate world of language can

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Richard Swann

so enthral us as that we lose a sense of proportion of the world beyond or

outside language. Robotics and advanced computer technology have extended
this bewitchment further through the language of software – computer
language(s) that aim to go beyond mere representation to replicating fully
the real world in the form of algorithms. But once we become bewitched
by the algorithms, what of the real world have we ditched in this headlong
rush to datify, correlate and streamline living? Is it right that we should
be increasingly nudged to act solely on the basis of correlation and not
causation? And who, in the future, will be brave enough to offer reasons
for why not? Let us also not forget the crucial issues of whether the algorithms
themselves do not have ‘baked’ into them the highly idiosyncratic ‘DNA’of
early twenety-first century computing industry culture, or that the complexity
of algorithms might already have become so opaque that even the most
expert human overseers have no real idea of what they are doing and how.
Future Medicine
Among the many spheres of life affected by the growth of computing
power is medical research. To be sure, it had an effective life before
computing enabled it further, but the availability of increasingly powerful
mechanisms to capture, store, analyze and act upon data, empower it
further. Allied with a particular mindset driven by the highly instrumental,
disruptive and problem-solving culture of Silicon Valley, certain paths of
medical research are credibly extending into areas of radical longevity
of life, bespoke body and brain repair and enhancement. The genetics
revolution and nanotechnologies have the potential to repair any damage
or abnormality in the body and maybe in the brain as well. Over time,
and with the help of AI, we may be moving to a point where radical life
extension is possible, or alternatively, the extension of healthy life within
a less radically extended time frame. There may even be the possibility
of a certain kind of digital immortality. If our bodies cannot be continuously
repaired and revived, then some version of our ‘souls’, our memories,
even our consciousness, perhaps, can be captured in some sort of brain
scan and preserved indefinitely in ‘living’ digital form.
These developments, such as they might be, raise subtly different
questions about who we are and what new pressures may be brought to
bear on our sense of self and our collective identities, different from
questions raised by our enmeshment in the digital world. As our online
world increasingly frames our view of whatever is left of our offline world,
and the trade-offs that might entail in the views of our freedoms in each
of those domains, our physical selves may be increasingly liberated from
senescence and decrepitude, and even be enhanced to levels beyond the
physical norms of today. Ethical questions abound and are hotly debated.

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 Being Toward 2048: Parts I and II

It is not the place to rehearse those arguments here. But only to note a few
future concerns such as:
n The ethics of super long life – have these been fully explored?
What questions do these possibilities pose for the exploration of
being-toward-death and the meaning that can be made of life?
n What do the possibilities of radical body alteration and body
enhancement represent in terms of Dasein’s struggle with their
thrownness into the world, an aspect of which must include Dasein’s
genetic inheritance, as well as its expression through the environment
in which body and mind grow and age.
n As the genetic revolution unfolds, perhaps along a certain path
where embryos become increasingly carefully selected and modified
to maximize health, vigour and mental prowess, do we risk a kind
of reversion to an artificial genetic mean that fixes an early twenty-
first century aesthetic in order to purchase certainty in the present
rather than the flexibility of randomness into the future? Again,
this poses questions about the bearing of Dasein toward the future
if so much of the future has already been resolved at the genetic
level – the nature of historicity and futurity subtly alters when
genetic pre-determination becomes significantly alterable.
n If there is a pill for everything, or an army of nanobots to repair
any damage caused by accident, illness or genetic malfunctioning,
then what responsibility to ourselves do we continue to owe?
Particularly in the field of psychotherapy, a pill to fix any mood
tends to obviate, or undercut, the power of the healing struggle.
Yet who would deny the opportunity to alleviate pain quickly and
easily (and non-addictively) if it were possible? Our whole notions
of healing, or helping in the repair and recuperation of others, is
open to question, especially in an environment where a narrow
idea of efficiency predominates.
n Finally, such developments as may become possible in these fields
over the next thirty years will almost certainly be unequally available
to those in need. For the wealthy, money is certainly more likely to
buy the best of health and, in the future, will be key to the initial
distribution of new body and mind enhancements. In a world where
a few can essentially fulfil the fantasy of acquiring enhanced capabilities,
what of the rest who cannot and may never be able to?

Richard Swann MA (Oxon.), MBA (Lond.), MA (UoW), ADEP, UKCP(reg)

is a writer and thinker, currently living in Dubai, where the future seems
to be very present.
Contact: richardmswann1@btinternet.com

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Richard Swann

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